Positive, Negatives, and the Next Wave of Pirates......

Almost two months in, the Pirates season has been up and down to say the least......

-Andrew McCutchen has continued to be much better than advertised. According to this article, he is already a very similar player to Carl Crawford and has been the best CF in the league since his callup...He is extremely fun to watch. However, McCutchen has inexplicably been moved to third in the order and constantly comes up with no one on base. So, a lot of his hits and on base skills are being wasted. Partly because.....

-John Russell's lineup construction has been unbelievably bad. Why is Iwamura still batting leadoff? Why is McCutchen not batting first or second? Why is Delwyn Young and Bobby Crosby and their low OBPs batting second? Why is Ryan Church playing almost every day? Why is Ryan Doumit batting 7th? Its almost as if Russell is going out of his way to create worst possible lineup for actually scoring runs.

-Speaking of the "leadoff hitter," Aki Iwamura has been awful. He just finished a historic hitless streak and might have 5 or 6 total hits in the month of May. And his defense has fallen off a cliff. Anthony has already declared the trade for Iwamura the worst in baseball history.

-Ryan Doumit's has been great at the plate. He is second in the majors among qualifying (ie. have played enough games to be eligible for the batting title) catchers in OPS, behind only future hall of famer Joe Mauer. On the other hand, his defense has been atrocious. Players that have no other stolen bases are routinely stealing second off him. There is absolutely no fear from opposing baserunners.

-Guys like Lastings Milledge, Jeff Clement, and even Garrett Jones to an extent have underachieved so far.

-The backend of the bullpen has been almost perfect when given a chance to win/keep the team in the game. The team has lost one game they have had a lead after the 5th inning. Evan Meek especially has gone from a guy who couldn't throw strikes at all in 2008 to being almost unhittable. He is now throwing a 97 mph fastball and 81 mph curveball.

-The starting pitching was expected to be better. Charlie Morton's struggles/bad luck have been well documented by Anthony and I. Zach Duke and Paul Maholm have been average overall. Ross Ohlendorf missed almost a month and has pitched just ok otherwise. Daniel McCutchen might as well have been throwing batting practice out there. Brian Burres and Jeff Karstens have had their moments but have basically done what you expect them to to: sprinkle a good start or two in with a whole bunch of bad ones.

I could go on and on. For every positive, there is at least one negative.

Times may FINALLY be changing for the Bucs though. Neil Walker was called up today after continuing to dominate AAA like I wanted. And he is probably just the start of a domino effect of callups/promotions. Brad Lincoln will be called up soon to replace Burres. Alvarez and Tabata could be here not long after that. Guys like Bryan Morris and Diego Moreno are being promoted in the minors with others like Nathan Adcock and Jeff Locke ready to move on as well.

Here is just one potential starting lineup by the end of June:

LF Jose Tabata
CF Andrew McCutchen
3B Pedro Alvarez
1B Garrett Jones
C Ryan Doumit
RF Neil Walker
2B Andy Laroche
SS Ronny Cedeno

That is much more impressive than what is being run out there tonight. The guys that have struggled or underachieved in the majors are finally being pushed from below......

Why Charlie is Better than this...

Anthony strongly criticized Charlie Morton below. Obviously, this is a very easy thing to do right now. Of course, he didn't look deep into the stats (as usual). As bad as his numbers are right now, there are some definite reasons to be optimistic about Morton turning it around over the long haul.

Here are some of the oddities in Morton's 2010 stats after eight starts (courtesy of Fangraphs):

-Morton's left on Base percent (or strand rate) is 43.8%. The Major League Average is 71.5%. The worst number from a pitcher in 2009 that pitched at least 100 innings was 59%. In 2009, he was right in the middle of the league at 71.4%. Last night, Morton allowed 7 baserunners and 6 scored. These numbers are just impossible to maintain. Especially considering....

-His strikeouts are up and his walks down. He is striking out a very good 7.64 batters per 9 innings in 2010 compared to 5.75 in 2009. The walks are down over 1 per 9 innings as well (3.71 to 2.55). So, less balls are being put in play. That is always a good thing.

-His HR per flyball rate is 20.5%. Typically all pitchers, even the most dominant or most hittable ones, linger around 10%.

-Morton's Batting Average on Balls in play is .387. Again, this is way above the major league average of about .300. Morton's last year was .310 and .304 with the Braves.

There are plenty more stats that skew towards the unlucky for Charlie. I think you get the point though. It is almost impossible for him to keep these bad numbers up the way he is actually pitching. Its much more likely things will start to even out and his numbers the rest of the way are more in line with what we expected.

As for Anthony's boy Nate McLouth and that trade in general? Guys who (on a good team) are 4th or 5th outfielders themselves tend to bring back high risk, high reward guys like Morton and Hernandez (Locke is much more than a "questionable" prospect but some other time..). His contract was only team friendly if he kept hitting like he had in the first two months of 2008 when he would have been worth the money. He has not come close to doing that (with either team). Sure, he has had some unluckiness of his own in 2010 as his BABIP is a bit low, but he is also striking out more than ever (by a lot) with a drastic decrease in power. That is a terrible combination. Its very possible Nate peaked in those first two months of 2008.

Oh, that gold glove McLouth won? Its routinely viewed as one of the bigger jokes in Gold Glove voting history. Here is a post right after it happened by the author of a Pirates blog.

Most sane people view this trade as Huntington selling as high as he possibly could on a nice but not franchise changing player. Anthony will eventually get there with the rest of us.

CHAAAARLIE!!!!!!!!

I want everyone to know that Bird still defends the Nate McLouth trade.

To justify the trade, Bird points to Nate's paltry numbers since he joined the Braves.

What does that have to do with the trade? When the Pirates traded McLouth, he was a very good offensive center fielder and had just won a gold glove. His contract was also team-friendly. As far as the fans knew, he wasn't even on the trading block.

That means Neal Huntington got an offer he couldn't refuse. Rumor has it that Huntington didn't even bother to call the other 30 MLB franchises to leverage the Braves offer. Instead, he pulled the trigger.

So, what was so incredibly tempting to Neal?

Since Gorkys Hernandez projects to be a 4th or 5th outfielder and Jeff Locke is a questionable prospect, I'm guessing that Neal was infatuated with Charlie Morton.

Another great call, Neal. Find me a worse pitcher in the majors leagues, and I'll try to find you someone who will go to further depths to defend the Pirates than Bird will. We'll both fail...but not as bad as Charlie Morton does every time he takes the mound. Crazy.